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Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Politicians Worldwide Pursue Censorship

Originally Published September 10, 2012; Last Updated August 07, 2018; Last Republished August 07, 2018:

Politicians worldwide must pursue transparent governance and continuous campaigns to reduce corruption, instead of pursuing censorship. Kudos to Indian cartoonist Aseem Trivedi who must be immediately released from jail and permitted to non-violently express dissent as he sees fit.

India et al's strategy of arresting dissidents for sedition has a long history of global failure. Failing in our nation America when dissidents were arrested, jailed and prosecuted under our Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789.

...this is filtering by "private companies" facing extraordinary scrutiny from government's focused on usage of social media platforms for overt and covert memetic warfare...of course if your account is filtered it can seem a lot like government censorship...we can expect some mistakes as companies learn to facilitate customers' experience and government regulation...filtering "QVC for Conspiracy" is not one of them...

Psst, don't use the ridiculous Russia election meddling and recent dis(mis)information campaigns as an excuse to censor, filter, or regulate speech on the Internet.

Yes, help our intelligence, media, and citizenry do a better job informing themselves and others about how meddling and dis(mis) information campaigns work (Russia's and others), without censorship, filtering or regulation.

It seems useful to remind the prospective president of the United States that he's a temporary guest in our White House. He would do well to respect our Constitution, customary practices, and the cherished status given our First Amendment.

Perhaps we can "relocate" move the prospective president of the United States to a tent on the White House lawn as a teachable moment of American constitutional priorities.

All politicians will forever try and fail to control "the message"—China and the 50¢ party (五毛党), Turkey, North Korea, Egypt, Iran, Israel, United States, Britain, Singapore [substitute your favorite repressive or not so repressive government] et al. will also fail.

Government leaders (or surrogates) secretly and opaquely sending large sums of money out of their country seems like indicia of instability. Subsequent censorship of information disclosing such secret transfers coupled with military aggression, exaggerated nationalism and repression of dissidents seems like a baleful omen of an accelerating instability.

Ironically, increasing the instability, which censorship and secrecy seeks to avoid!

A global citizen's rights to open, transparent, and coercion-censorship-corruption-free government must be universally established, maintain and protected. These minimum universal rights must inalienably attach to each citizen of all nations and governments.